"Lost Coast" is a tech demo for HDR lighting, not an expansion. I'm pretty sure you don't have to own HL2 to play it.

Parking meters still impose a cost on the preexisting residents and are not a wholly entrepreneurial solution since they require cooperation from the city.

Parking permits could work if they are granted in perpetuity to whoever currently resides in the preexisting residences, but a) somebody still has to pay for enforcement, b) I've never heard of a parking permit system that actually worked that way, and c) it is also a government, rather than entrepreneurial, solution.

Besides, why solve the problem in a way that must be managed in perpetuity when you can solve it once and for all by just making the developer build enough parking in the first place?

(By the way, I'd like you to know that I'm not making these arguments because I'm a fan of automobile-centric development -- quite the contrary! Rather, I merely take issue with the idea of letting the developer do whatever is "fiscally optimal" for himself without considering the rest of the community that would be impacted by the result.)

they put all their offices in the middle of major urban areas

It's not even just that! I'd happily commute to Google's office in the middle of the major urban area I already live in, but (as far as I can tell) their office here does only operations, not development.

I think you are feeling very confused: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

You actually live in something *better* than a direct democracy.

A direct democracy enjoys no constitutional guarantees of rights. It's strictly majority rule.

Right this way sir... here's some bread, we hope you enjoy the circus.

This study defines "rich people" as those making around $146000/year.

If you think about it, there's no control for expenses there, so it's not a very effective definition (I'm always kind of a amazed at the mindset in the US that tries to simplify things by drawing a numeric line in the sand, as if there were no other issues. And people put up with it. We need better schools.

I define "rich" as: wealthy enough to be living in a manner comfortable in every material way to the individual or family, and able to survive indefinitely in that state, or in an increasingly wealthy state without relying on income from, or charity of, others. Regardless of if one actually chooses to exist in that state, or not.

Not trying to force that definition on anyone else, but that's how I see it personally.

I recommend antibiotics.

The transition was from a flawed, but still readily identifiable constitutional republic (not a democracy), to a corporate oligarchy.

This has never been a democracy, and furthermore, the constitution insists that the federal government guarantee each state a republican form of government, as in, a republic -- not a democracy. That's in article 4, section 4.

This is why representatives decide the actual matters, and voters don't, in the basic design.

Of course, now even the representatives don't decide -- nor judges -- if the legislation deals in any significant way with business interests. The only way the old system still operates even remotely the way it was designed to is when the issue(s) at hand a purely social ones. Even then, the bill of rights seems to be at the very bottom of any legislator's or judge's list of concerns.

Can't see any of this changing, though. The public is too uninformed, and short of completely revamping the school curriculums, they're going to remain that way.

Guess I should have been a little more explicit. I meant, as distinguished from one that required another object impact. Just an original ring system.

...a collapsed ring system?

What nonsense. The Constitution does not legitimize sedition.

Bullshit. Laws which prohibit sedition are unconstitutional. Wikipedia quotes several Supreme Court cases:

In the seminal free speech case of New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, the Court declared, "Although the Sedition Act was never tested in this Court, the attack upon its validity has carried the day in the court of history." 376 U.S. 254, 276 (1964). In a concurring opinion in Watts v. United States, which involved an alleged threat against President Lyndon Johnson, William O. Douglas noted, "The Alien and Sedition Laws constituted one of our sorriest chapters; and I had thought we had done with them forever ... Suppression of speech as an effective police measure is an old, old device, outlawed by our Constitution."

When the constitution was ratified, the militia was the only defense that the United States had, and all able bodied men were expected to be ready to serve.

On April 16, 2014, the militia is still the last defense that the people of the United States have against tyranny perpetrated against them by their government.

Your example is irrelevant because:

1. 1. We're talking about a chronic, ongoing issue, not a special-event-one-day-per-year one.
2. 2. If homeowners let people park on their laws every day, it would kill their grass
3. 3. Such a thing can't happen anyway, because dense parts of San Francisco like we're talking about here don't have lawns big enough to park on.
4. 4. Even if such a solution were physically possible, it would certainly violate San Francisco ordinances (zoning code etc.).

More to the point, the fundamental problem here is that street parking (which is what you end up with without forcing the developer to build more via regulation) is a commons, and no private actor (entrepreneur or otherwise) is capable of "fixing the problem."

("Fiscally optimal" meaning the amount where the marginal cost of building another parking space (MC) equals the marginal revenue from building it (MR).)

Surely that calculation would include the externalized cost of more competition for on-street parking the developer would be imposing on the neighbors... right?

Yeah, I thought not.

its pretty much the case that programming languages in which it is harder to make bugs are also harder to make security problems. Because security problems are just a special case of bugs. So all the things we know about writing better languages are important for security. Unfortunately, language technology has always been under-appreciated. People will just use what is popular, which often times is just C or Java and so forth.